Realities, Rockets Obscure Hope in Israel

There may be no more fecund metaphor for President Obama’s recent (and remarkable) trip to the Levant than the story of a Gaza rocket that was fired into Israel during the second day of his visit. With the collective focus on the presidential trip and much of the country already preparing for the Passover holiday, police didn’t discover the rocket until yesterday. Where was it hiding? A kindergarten in Sderot.

“We condemn this violation of the important ceasefire that protects both Israelis and Palestinians, a violation Hamas has a responsibility to prevent,” Obama said as he arrived in Ramallah.

Since the much heralded trip ended, the initial forward momentum held for a bit. News of a budding Turkish-Israel détente gave some hope. But reality keeps getting in the way. With Egypt weakened by critical shortages in supplies and a faltering economy began to cast doubt on the country’s ability to help maintain a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. That ceasefire was breached again by the firing of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel yesterday, bringing about a response by the Israeli Air Force on Gaza last night, and the launching of two more rockets from Gaza today. Neither rocket caused any physical damage, but after months of relative calm, the other tolls were obvious.

Further punctuating the regional crisis, at the end of the weekend, during which a 2,000-year-old synagogue in Damascus was looted and torched, a mortar shell fired from Syria landed in the Golan Heights. Neither the source nor the intended target of the mortar fire is known, but amid fears that the civil war in Syria might spill over into Israel’s north, this was not a good sign.

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Israel has made itself into a militant supremacist
theocracy/ethnocracy with ICBM nukes; a very real and rapidly
increasing threat to itself and to the whole world. A pariah among
nations. Justice demands that UN and NATO impose resolution just as
involuntary, disruptive and humiliating to Israel as Israel has
wreaked upon occupied Palestine for generations. The Jewish State
must be made to recognize an armed Palestine with externally enforced
autonomy, eviction of all settlers, true contiguity encompassing
Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem together, neither pinched nor
parceled, and pay punitive reparations.

PhillipNaglesays:

April 3, 2013 - 11:50 am

You don’t impose a solution on a coutry with nuclear tipped ICBM’s (though I don’t think they have or need them with that range). Maybe NATO should worry about other subjugated peoples likes Basques or Kurds. The UN’s list of peoples subjugated by it’s members is too long to list.

Beatrix17says:

April 3, 2013 - 2:33 pm

Israel has never occupied Palestine. They own land they won from Jordan and Egypt after they were attacked and this land has Palestinian inhabitants. They’ve offered the land to the Palestinians to form a homeland, but Arafat and now his assistant Abbas have rejected this.

Abbas has no idea how to lead a nation. He can’t even get voted into office by the 2.6 million people on the West Bank. How is he going to lead the 10 million Palestinians who are looking for a homeland? .

Tiny Israel’s ability to defend herself from the 500 million Arabs, Turks, and Persians is a miracle.

silverbackVsays:

April 3, 2013 - 2:36 pm

Someone must have helped you with this post. A person just can’t be that wrong all by themselves.

ginzy1says:

April 3, 2013 - 11:30 am

“Realities, Rockets Obscure Hope in Israel”

Correction: Realities, rockets demolished the delusions (or should demolish the delusions) of those who don’t really understand at a gut level, the neighborhood in which Israel exists. Among them are Obama himself, John Kerry, and many if not most other foreign policy / defense Obamanoids. Also included are many think-tankers such as David Makovsky. And we shouldn’t forget those pontificating pooh-bahs of punditry like Fareed Zakaria, Jeffery Goldberg (although of late he does have his moments of lucidity), Tom Friedman, E.J. Dionne and others. And of course most of the Tabletarians.

Most Israelis (not the subset of university students carefully selected and filtered by the US embassy here to provide Obama with a compliant audience) have long been disabused of peace delusions, as has been repeatedly demonstrated by the election results. See Livni’s 6 seats and Shelley Yechimovitch’s avoidance of discussing the “peace process” ever since she entered the Knesset.

hg
J’lem / Efrat

PhillipNaglesays:

April 3, 2013 - 11:51 am

The president’s trip accomplished exactly what most people thought it would, nothing, not even good will.

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